I wasn't completely happy with the way the first version of this piece worked out, so I thought I'd try it again. This is now closer to how I intended it to be, but now, ironically, I suspect that the first version is better in many ways...perhaps the third version will be the charm.

The Boy Who Sang at the End of the World II, 2013, acrylic on board, 10" x 8".

Below is the original version:

The Boy Who Sang at the End of the World, 2013, acrylic on board, 12" x 9".

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

This is a series of 4 small acrylic paintings on board that I did in order to put together a GIF animation. I used Squirlz Morph & Adobe Fireworks to make & compress the animation...the images went from being vividly colored to monochrome, which adds to the atmosphere in the final animation. This is just another experiment on the way to making my artwork animate in a more sophisticated way...but this animation has a rawness that I quite like.

The Wings of an Angel, 2013, animated GIF.

The Wings of an Angel, 2013, a series of 4 paintings on panel, each one 10" x 8".

Monday, February 25, 2013

This is another animated GIF experiment done with Squirlz Morph, a freeware morphing program. I used two recent small paintings of heads, the Boy with a Long Neck, & the Madonna of the Western Lands, to create this strangely fascinating & disturbing image of the male & female images morphing into each other. I originally made this for my Tumblr blog (mymythsandmonsters.tumblr.com), but I thought I would also post it here.

Friday, February 22, 2013

I used a freeware morphing program called Squirlz Morph to create this animation of 2 recent Narcissus drawings. I'm not going for a slick kind of animation here, but there is a kind of quality to it that I like...

Possibly the last in this little series of animated GIFs of paintings...this is The Onset of Winter from 2005. I mostly created these to amuse myself, but they do add some kind of other dimension to the pieces, albeit in a simplistic way...

Thursday, February 07, 2013

My wife, the lovely Diana Ayton-Shenker (& partner, goddess, poet, mother-of-children, life partner, etc.) is featured in this teaser trailer for a forthcoming documentary on crowd funding, social investment & innovation. She comes in around the 1:58 mark.

I was just fooling around with Pixlr, which is a free, online image editor that works in your browser. It's obviously based on Photoshop-style image editing programs, which means that it's pretty easy & intuitive to use (if you know Photoshop). This is the "kaleidoscope" filter, which reminds me of Kai's Power Tools of days long gone by...

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About Me

I'm a British artist currently resident in upstate New York, where I live in the wondrous Hudson Valley with my wife & children. My work deals with imagination, myth, the human condition & social issues, and the way they intersect & allow us to understand the world. I've exhibited extensively in Europe, the USA, & more recently, Israel. You can see more of my work at www.ayton.net.
Regarding re-using my artwork from this blog (for not-for-profit purposes): in most cases, it's OK. Please credit me as the creator of the image, & if possible link to the page where you found the piece. If the image is used in an inappropriate setting, I will most likely ask you to remove it. Thanks.